The prowling lion

The wilderness is where the enemy prowls. He came to Jesus in the desert at His hungriest, after forty days with nothing, and he comes to us the same way, in the lean and disoriented hours, because that is where we are easiest to take. Peter does not soften it. He names an adversary, a roaring lion walking the perimeter, looking for someone to devour. The image is meant to sober us, not to terrify us. It tells the truth a tidy account of the wilderness leaves out: that the disorientation is not always merely circumstantial, not only grief and confusion and bad luck, but sometimes a season in which an enemy is at work, exploiting the very weakness the wilderness has opened. And yet the same Peter who names the lion does not counsel panic. He counsels something steadier. Be sober. Be watchful. Withstand him, firm in the faith. The lion is real, but he is met, and he is met by the unflashy work of staying alert and standing your ground. Knowing this changes the wilderness without ending it. You stop blaming only yourself for every dark thought, and you stop being naive about where some of them come from. You learn to watch, and to resist.

Much of the cruelty of a long disorientation is that it leaves us undefended, and an enemy knows it. He does not invent new lies in the wilderness; he simply finds the old ones easier to plant in depleted soil. God has abandoned you. Your prayers go nowhere. You may as well stop. These are not always your own conclusions, arrived at by honest reasoning. Sometimes they are suggestions, and they have an author who means you harm. To name that is not superstition; it is sobriety. The danger of refusing to name it is that you absorb every dark whisper as simple fact, and the danger of naming it badly is that you see a devil behind every disappointment and live in fear. Peter steers between both. He says the lion is real, and then he says resist him, firm in the faith, knowing that the same sufferings are being accomplished in your brothers throughout the world. The wilderness has a spiritual dimension. So does the One who keeps you in it, and He is stronger than the lion who walks its edge.